


written, bound, and etched

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:47:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24777898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: There were six versions of the Framework. Jemma remembers them all.
Relationships: Jemma Simmons/Grant Ward
Comments: 5
Kudos: 67





	written, bound, and etched

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning that this fic is not nice to Fitz. He's not in it, he and his actions are only referenced, but some of those actions are really bad and also why I chose not to use archive warnings. But I did still rate this G so take from that what you will.
> 
> Title from Timebelle's "Apollo."

Two hours after they land, Jemma emerges from her bathroom just as Skye is entering her quarters.

“There you are!” she says with obvious relief. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Jemma turns her back on her and checks her reflection in the mirror over her dresser. Luckily she thought to take a change of clothes in with her and, after a quick adjustment of her low collar, is satisfactorily covered. Her hair, however, is still something of a mess.

“I sincerely can’t remember the last time I showered,” she says while grabbing her comb, “I thought it’d be obvious where I went.”

Emotions flicker across Skye’s face. Whatever she’s thinking, she doesn’t voice it. Instead she sits, overly casual, on the end of Jemma’s bed.

“How did you even get down here?” she asks, brushing soot off her shoulder as if to emphasize her own harrowing descent. It’s a valid question, as the base above is a bombed out mess. Jemma hasn’t gotten the details yet—and isn’t certain she wants them regardless—but the short of it is that Skye felt it necessary to stop her robotic pursuers with an explosion that has rendered the top two levels of the base a jagged mess of broken architecture.

Luckily such an attack was factored in when the base was built and the lower levels are quite stable, with water and power still functioning even.

“Carefully.”

Skye tips her head. _No kidding_ , her expression says. “Was it really that important?” There’s an undercurrent to the question. Something somewhere between hurt and censure. She smiles weakly. “There are showers on the Zephyr.”

“There are.” But Jemma’s never lived on the Zephyr. She lived here, in this room, between these four walls. But how to explain to Skye, who entered the Framework only as an invader, never a prisoner-

Jemma drops her head forward. She rests her weight on her fists on the top of the dresser, her comb clutched so tightly in the left the dull plastic might break skin.

Daisy. She is speaking to _Daisy_ , not to Skye. She hasn’t been Skye in years.

“Simmons?” She’s on her feet as if she expects Jemma to keel over any moment.

“After-” Jemma stops herself, swallows down the breath that was meant to be a number. “After the time I’ve spent as Radcliffe’s _science experiment_ , I preferred to wash in my own space.”

It’s true. Apparently she’s spent some time—weeks, she was told, but no one would give her a firm number and she wonders if they even know—plugged into his sick fantasy world. During that time her body was shoved to one corner of his lab and carted about like luggage when he was forced to flee, to be later propped up like a macabre statue along with the others when they were taken.

Daisy of course accepts this explanation. It doesn’t occur to her that Jemma wouldn’t have been aware of these violations. That while the knowledge of them does leave her skin crawling, it is _only_ knowledge, not memory, and thus it isn’t likely to have caused her distress sufficient to send her through the dangerous maze of rubble between the hangar and her quarters.

Jemma looks in the mirror, taking in the small details of this room. The books on the shelf that were never published in the Framework. The coat she never bought. The afghan her mother never knitted. These are _her_ things in _her_ room in the _real_ world.

“It’s okay,” Daisy says softly. “I was worried, that’s all.”

Something about the way she says it strikes Jemma as decidedly ominous. “I wouldn’t have left the base.”

“I know. It’s just- we don’t know who’s been here since we left.”

Jemma holds her stare in the mirror, waiting for the further explanation she knows Daisy is holding back.

Sure enough, Daisy lets out a puff of air. “We found out you weren’t, you know, _you_ because Ward captured you- her- whatever. He sent us the thing’s severed head like he’s a robot serial killer or something.”

An odd chill dances over Jemma’s skin at that mental image.

“So much for him reforming Hydra, huh?”

Jemma doesn’t bother to point out that killing the robotic double that was impersonating her is hardly in line with Ward’s typical nefarious behavior (she would have expected him to reprogram the LMD for his own purposes and allow the team to rescue it); as Ward’s recent string of good behavior seems aimed only at infuriating his former teammates, it would be a rather paltry defense.

Daisy seems on the verge of saying more but, once again, chooses to divert the conversation instead.

“I’m glad you’re okay. And about what you said—about the Framework. Not,” Daisy amends quickly, “that I’m glad Radcliffe messed with your head and replaced you with a robot while the real you was comatose and stuck in his weird little delusion.”

Jemma finds it in her to smile as she faces her. Reassured she hasn’t taken her words the wrong way, Daisy smiles back.

“But you were in there longer than anyone. I was worried- But it’s okay, you get it.”

Usually quick to track a train of thought, Jemma finds herself lost now. She might worry that’s some lingering effect of what was done to her mind, but she thinks it’s much more likely Daisy is being her typically imprecise self.

“You get that none of it was real. Nothing that happened—or that we did—matters.” There’s a question in that statement, a hope that Jemma will reassure her.

Jemma can’t do that. She wants to. More than anything, she wants to tell Daisy she’s absolutely right and nothing that happened while they were in the Framework matters out here in the real world.

She lifts her arms in what, to Daisy, must appear a defensive posture. One arm across her breasts, her palm pressed just beneath her heart as if to guard it. And her left lifted across her stomach, palm up so that she can see the blank skin of her forearm.

“He’s freaking out,” Daisy says softly, plaintively. “He keeps saying he’s a- a _monster_.”

Jemma doesn’t refute that either.

“Talbot came, after you came down here. He was monitoring the base, I guess some of the agents who made it out went to him. Fitz tried to hand himself over, kept saying he was Hydra and he needed to be locked up. It took Coulson half an hour to convince Talbot he’d been brainwashed and didn’t know what he was saying.”

“What do you expect me to do?” Jemma asks, eyes still on her arm.

“Tell him he’s not!” Daisy’s outburst finally pulls Jemma’s attention fully back to her. She’s on her feet, face contorted in desperation, and around them the few knick-knacks Jemma allows herself are shaking. “Tell him he _was_ brainwashed and none of it was his fault!”

“But it was.”

Jemma’s words are soft, pitched more from her own private hurt than a desire to deescalate, but it accomplishes that end all the same.

Daisy deflates. The knick-knacks still. Jemma can see before Daisy speaks that her objective here has shifted. In order to drag Jemma upstairs to reassure Fitz, she will first have to reassure Jemma herself.

“Simmons, _no_ -”

“I was in the Framework longer than anyone,” Jemma cuts in, eager to end this conversation if not to get this out in the open. “Before it was an entire world it was small. A tiny loop of program feeding into itself like an ouroboros. When successive repetitions allowed me to find the flaws, the program was altered to be more complex, more deceptive. I remember the first time I was given the chance to change my own history and undo my regret. I remember what it felt like to have the program directing me. At the time I assumed it was instinct but now I can see how that moment—how every moment the Framework required me to act differently than I otherwise would have—felt.”

Daisy is listening with an expression heavy on horror and sympathy. Feeling exposed, Jemma hugs her arms more tightly around herself, but presses on.

“Even in those moments, I still had choices. The choices were very rarely binary; there were almost always options within the Framework’s parameters. Even when there weren’t, I could have gone against those ‘instincts’ and forced the Framework to alter events around me.”

She did that once. On the third reboot, the first that saw Hydra beating out SHIELD. She chose to stand defiant when it came time to hail or die. She was shot and, when she “miraculously” survived, forced to endure months of painful rehabilitation before the next reboot. Perhaps it was the lingering memory of pain or perhaps the Framework had better learned how to manipulate her because she chose differently the next time.

Daisy has to swallow twice before she can respond. “Simmons. I know it feels like it was your fault, but it was programming-”

Jemma presses her hand more tightly to her breast until her bones protest. “Don’t. Don’t try to make this simple. And don’t ask me to go easy on him.”

“You know he would never-”

“But he did,” Jemma cuts in coldly and is gratified to see Daisy’s gaze drop to her bare arm where it’s fallen at her side. “He _stole_ my _choice_.”

Daisy flinches, no doubt remembering her own experiences with Hive.

Jemma turns back to her mirror, orienting herself so that her own reflection blocks Daisy’s and she can see only the reassuring parts of the room. “Lie to him if you want,” she says, aiming for a cool and unaffected tone and falling woefully short, “but don’t ask me to help you.”

She combs another knot from her hair. When it becomes clear she has no intention of resuming the conversation, Daisy finally leaves. Jemma keeps brushing, though the reflection she tries to focus on grows increasingly blurry until she can no longer see a thing.

&&&&&

It was the fifth and final reboot of the Framework which saw Jemma bound to Fitz.

In the chaos of the uprising, Fitz suggested the bonding. It made no sense to her—did he hope it would help them find one another if they became separated?

They had talked about it once or twice in their early days together but never again in years. What had at first seemed a means of getting the ball rolling when they were young and eager for life to begin was later proven to be jumping the gun when their years of camaraderie didn’t produce a natural bond. She was often grateful—in both the real and fabricated worlds—that she hadn’t made such a mistake.

With years of experience behind her, manufacturing a bond seemed a rather drastic measure, albeit they were in desperate times. She was so frightened and so confused—by the revelations of the day and by his strange suggestion—she didn’t stop him taking her hand. By the time she realized he had already begun, the pain of the forced bonding was already weakening her knees.

She tried to fight him, to rebel against this invasion of her very soul, but the drugs he’d given her to ease the process only eased his way in.

When she finally rose back to proper consciousness, his name was written on her left arm—along her vein, he said, straight to her heart; on the arm she would less hate to lose, she didn’t say—and there was a Hydra on the wall of her new quarters.

Perhaps the Framework did push him into it. She was well past refusing Hydra by that point, but perhaps the program still sought a more fool-proof way of stopping her rebellion and found it in this.

That rings false to her, however. In her own experience the Framework was only ever a restrictive force, not a prescriptive one.

 _Don’t_ leave the room.

 _Don’t_ let Fitz hit the EMP.

 _Don’t_ take the latter option in Hydra’s allegiance or death offer.

They were caged. Perhaps they were brainwashed in the sense that their memories were altered and they were misled about the reality of the world in which they lived, but they weren’t _brainwashed_. They weren’t stripped of all free will and happy to comply.

It shouldn’t be a comfort but it is.

&&&&&

Jemma has no idea how long after the diner the interrogation room door opens. She—and she presumes the others, seeing as her last memory is of standing with them, arms up while heavily armored men closed in—were put in some sort of suspended mental state rather than being arrested in the traditional manner. She simply blinked and she was here. As is typical of interrogation rooms, there’s nothing by which to mark the passage of time and she only knows that she’s feeling anxious and annoyed by the wait, which is no doubt precisely what her captors are after.

Or, perhaps, precisely what she should be feeling considering that it’s Ward who walks through the door.

His presence hits her like one of Daisy’s attacks.

He lets out a slow breath, no less affected than she is.

Then he smiles in that sharp way of his and says, “That is … something.”

In the Framework’s final reboot, when Jemma was bound to Fitz, she felt nothing for him. She knew, in the same way she knows of the secondary crimes against her body while she was in the Framework, that he had made himself her soulmate and she was bound to him, but there was no _soul_ bond between them. Those names on their arms might as well have been tattoos for all the good they did.

But Fitz wasn’t the first supposed soulmate Jemma gained while in the Framework.

“Yes,” she agrees, feeling somewhat breathless. “Quite.”

He moves along the far side of the table, as if he means to take the chair but passes it by instead. “‘Quite’? That’s all you’ve got to say?”

She shrugs, palms up to show her lack of answers. “What am I meant to say?”

“I don’t know. ‘If you touch me, I’ll kill you!’ ‘It’s some other Jemma Simmons!’ ‘Help! Help! Someone save me from my evil soulmate!’” He taps his knuckles on the table with each absurd suggestion, slowing his approach until he’s stopped at the corner on her side. Only a few feet separate them now, twice the width of the chair she never bothered to sit in between them. She feels it like a rubber band ready to snap.

She breathes slowly, steadily, forcing her voice to remain even. “No one in this base—at least I presume we’re in one of your bases—will protect me from you, so calling for help is a waste. We both know it’s _not_ some other Jemma Simmons so there’s no point in trying. And I would hardly murder my own soulmate.”

Ward blinks. It’s the only sign he gives that she’s surprised him.

She shrugs again. “I’ve had more time to acclimate than you have.”

“Have you?”

As all research suggests soulmarks appear simultaneously, his confusion is warranted—though she could do without the mocking tone.

“How much do you know about what SHIELD has been up to lately?” she asks.

He crosses his arms over his chest, resting his weight on his heels in a relaxed posture she knows to be a lie. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me what they’ve been up to and I’ll tell you if I knew about it.”

Always the tactician. She can’t help a smile.

That throws him off as well, it’s wonderfully satisfying.

Though she hates to increase the distance between them, she has the sense once it’s closed she’ll find it difficult to think clearly. She begins circling the table in the same direction he did simply for something to eat up her nervous energy while she speaks.

“A mad scientist we made the mistake of trusting put us into a computer program meant to simulate reality. One of few alterations he imposed was that our regrets would be undone. I suspect, given how things progressed with each additional prisoner and their regret, that this was a _necessity_.”

They’re at opposing corners, as far apart as the table can separate them. He raises an eyebrow, not quite tracking the significance of her assumption. She continues on, breathing more easily with each inch.

“The Framework’s architect had run afoul of Hive, so he built it into the program that Hive never existed. As such, my greatest regret was undone before I even entered the program.”

“Daniels,” Ward says, not without sympathy. Though he didn’t get directly involved in that mess last year, preferring to stay far away from Hydra’s more cultish factions, it’s little surprise he remained apprised of events.

In fact, it’s something of a relief. She won’t have to tell him about her lost love.

She nods once, allowing the grief to halt her progress lest she feel anything positive while she thinks of Will. “As such, it seems the program sought to undo a slightly lesser regret.”

Her first memory after her last round in the simplistic mind maze is of Cuba. She stood in a shed with Fitz and felt, more than she did on the day these events truly occurred, that something tragic was about to befall them. She suppressed the desire to _run_ which had suddenly seized her and in moments they were captured by Ward.

On the Bus, when Fitz was about to activate the EMP which would only temporarily injure Garrett and see them both dropped to their near deaths, she felt that same premonitory feeling, only this time her flight instinct translated to fight. She needed to act and _now_.

“I agreed to save Garrett’s life,” she says, “before Fitz could activate his EMP device, thus preventing you from dropping us from the Bus.”

“And you think that’s when this-” he gestures between them, from one mark to the other- “happened?”

“I had barely finished making my offer when you—your Framework self, of course—and I both doubled over in pain.”

Perhaps later she’ll tell him that it was different from what she felt in that final iteration. It wasn’t wholeness, not really, but that was of course because he wasn’t the real Ward. But it felt near to it. Like wholeness was within her grasp, closer than it had been since those last days on Maveth. And when she was with Fitz, she only felt wrongness, an alienation. If she was to be with a false soulmate, it could at least have been _her_ soulmate.

But Ward is a jealous man. It would hardly do to find her soulmate by saving Fitz’s life only to effectively ask her soulmate to kill him after the fact. If she ever does tell Ward, it will have to wait until the others have escaped.

As she often did in that first program in which they were bonded, whenever that false Ward tried to tease her into forgetting she was bound to a murderer, she says, “I compromised my morals.”

Then and hundreds of times after, in every iteration of the Framework, she compromised. Not a programmed version of Jemma Simmons. The real, genuine Jemma.

True, the choices the Framework offered were often difficult, with no truly good option between them. But she still chose. She and no one else.

She meets Ward’s eyes squarely, refusing to hide from difficult truths. “And the universe rewarded me with you.”

She tries to sound derisive but knows she only sounds fond. She had ample time to learn to love him in the Framework—and that, when her mind had forgotten all the months she spent hardening her heart to him. She’s afraid she might be hopelessly in love with him now.

He smiles at that and steps forward, meeting her rather than waiting for her to reach him. That could be demanding of him, but she can only think it’s fitting. Soulmates are meant to meet in the middle after all.

But he’s left space between them. Just a breath, just enough her skin buzzes in anticipation of his touch.

“You compromised your morals,” he says slowly, agreeing exactly as his double would often do while kissing her into acquiescence, “to save the life of someone you love.”

Her focus is on his hand, hovering just shy of her cheek, and so it takes her a moment to truly hear his words. When she does, she can only gape. That qualifier was not one which ever occurred to his double.

“Sounds familiar,” he says, sounding more resigned than proud.

It’s a decidedly rosy reading of his behavior at the time and completely ignores his subsequent actions—heading Hydra, kidnapping the team, sending them her severed head.

Of course, she can imagine _why_ he would be so infuriated. He thought he was kidnapping his soulmate away from his bitterest enemies and instead found a robot in her place. Anyone would be a bit testy.

And Daisy wasn’t simply being sarcastic earlier; Ward truly has made strides to reform Hydra. Albeit with every one aimed at angering SHIELD in general and the team in particular.

She supposes, given how her own descent within the Framework began and that it seems she was able to retain some sense memory, if not a true one, of her previous virtual lives, she can better understand how he arrived where he has.

Truthfully, it’s really no surprise at all they’re bonded.

She tips her head into his hand. That slight contact overwhelms them both for a moment, singing along her skin like sunlight for the first time in six months.

But that is nothing to the joy she gets from seeing Ward’s eyes shut and his expression open up in what she can only describe as wonder.

She reaches out to rest her hand on his chest, in the spot she knows his soulmark to be. He bows his head and closes his hand over hers. Slowly, so as to feel every faint point of contact, she draws closer. One foot between his, their hips brushing, his hand dropping from her cheek to her shoulder then her back, her head settling comfortably against his chest.

The passage of time escapes her once more, but she hardly minds it in this instance. What is time to the simple joy of resting in her soulmate’s arms?

But eventually time must march on and Ward speaks. “I hope you know,” he says between swipes of his thumb over the back of her hand, “that I’m not letting you go anytime soon.”

She lifts her head only so far as to meet his eyes when he tips his down towards her. They haven’t kissed yet, she realizes.

His expression makes it clear his statement is about more than simply letting her leave his arms, not that she ever had any doubt.

As she never had any intention of going anywhere, she says, “Good,” and arches her neck to catch his lips with hers.

The kiss is worth waiting a hundred illusory lifetimes for.


End file.
